The United States that entered the twentieth century was vastly different from the nation that emerged from the Civil War. Industrialization, mass immigration, the growing presence of women in the work force, and the rapid advance of the cities had transformed American society.Broad in scope, The Gilded Age brings together sixteen original essays that offer lively syntheses of modern scholarship while making their own interpretive arguments. These engaging pieces allow students to ...

Albion Fellows BaconIndiana's Municipal HousekeeperRobert G. BarrowsExamines the career of a leading Progressive Era reformer.Born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1865, Albion Fellows was reared in the nearby hamlet of McCutchanville and graduated from Evansville High School. She worked for several years as a secretary and court reporter, toured Europe with her sister, married local merchant Hilary Bacon in 1888, and settled into a seemingly comfortable routine of ...

Age of Betrayal is a brilliant reconsideration of America's first Gilded Age, when war-born dreams of freedom and democracy died of their impossibility. Focusing on the alliance between government and railroads forged by bribes and campaign contributions, Jack Beatty details the corruption of American political culture that, in the words of Rutherford B. Hayes, transformed “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” into “a government by the corporations, of th...

Did the civil rights movement impact the development of the American state? Despite extensive accounts of civil rights mobilization and narratives of state building, there has been surprisingly little research that explicitly examines the importance and consequence that civil rights activism has had for the process of state building in American political and constitutional development. Through a sweeping archival analysis of the NAACP's battle against lynching and mob violence from 1909 to...

2017 Wilbur Non-Fiction Award RecipientWinner of the 2018 Author's Award in scholarly non-fiction, presented by the New Jersey Studies Academic AllianceWinner, 2020 Kornitzer Book Prize, given by Drew UniversityExamines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth centuryWhen a domestic servant n...

"This thoughtful, engaging examination of the Reconstruction Era . . . will be appealing . . . to anyone interested in the roots of present-day American politics" ( Publishers Weekly).The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. In many ways, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners forged a national identity that united three very different regions i...

**An essential history of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America“Elegant and expansive.” —New York TimesWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for HistoryNamed a Best Book of the Year by Ms. • Time • Foreign Affairs • Smithsonian**In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in Ame...

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogeno...

'…from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, AmherstThe Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a la...

Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful ...

Women’s Suffrage and the Continuing Fight for Women’s Rights“Weatherford’s book traces the philosophical roots of the Seneca Falls convention to the 17th century and women who defied the dominant religious leadership in the nascent American colonies.” ―Publishers Weekly2020 Winner Sarton Women's Literary Award for NonfictionAn inspirational women’s rights gift. In her book Victory for the Vote...

With America's current and ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor and the constant threat of the disappearance of the middle class, the Progressive Era stands out as a time when the middle class had enough influence on the country to start its own revolution. Before the Progressive Era most Americans lived on farms, working from before sunrise to after sundown every day except Sunday with tools that had changed very little for centuries. Just three decades later, America was utter...